When it opened early last spring I thought of Tallulah—Troy Graves’s comeback from Meritage—as a relative bright spot on Lincoln Square’s increasingly mediocre restaurant row. Now with Eve, emerging from the crypt of the late Flapjaws Cafe, it seems he’s bringing the same relief to the Viagra Triangle. Touted as a more refined version of Tallulah, Eve is accordingly pricier and similarly congested—a condition slightly ameliorated by decorative smoke and mirrors, or rather sky blue paneling and mirrors. The food reflects the chef’s predilections for serious meat (short ribs and oxtails, sweetbreads, suckling pig, foie gras) as well as his generosity in portioning.
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And that’s the trouble with Graves. For all his intriguing combinations—pomegranate-glazed prawns with toasted chestnut panna cotta, mussels in ice wine—he has a tendency to sabotage himself: Some attractive-sounding sheep’s milk ricotta dumplings turned out to be dense, dry concussion grenades mining an otherwise enjoyable lamb ragout with Swiss chard, and a wonderfully sweet apple butter cheesecake drizzled with peppered caramel rendered undrinkable the shot of tart, brisk spiced cider it was served with. The duds aren’t all conceptual, either—we bit into bits of exoskeleton in both the lobster sausage and a prettily composed peekytoe crab salad. Still, there’s enough to like here to consider Eve a relatively progressive provocation to the neighborhood’s Axis of Mediocrity. —Mike Sula
But with the relative rarity of this sort of inherently soulful nosherei around town, it’s a shame that so many of the items I tried tasted soulless. The indifference in the kitchen seems to have infected the front of the house too—on two different trips I drew servers who had to be prodded to recount the specials (maybe it was their way of warning me to avoid that greasy buttermilk fried chicken; I wish I’d heeded them). On my maiden visit I ordered an oddly coupled cinnamon raisin bagel thin and cup of chicken soup and a hot corned beef and pastrami sandwich that arrived lukewarm, sans pastrami. A knish went missing on my second trip, but when it was located, dry and sandy, I regretted sending out the search party.
At Antica the pies are of the Neapolitan species, thin, charred, blistered crusts that get a bit swampy toward the center. They’re as pricey as the ones at Roscoe Village’s Spacca Napoli, but topped less lovingly: I was happy with the quality of the olives on the quattro stagioni, but the prosciutto could have been better. The balance of the menu is composed of a few antipasti—including calamari, tender but overbattered—and salads, including a particularly well-composed arugula-radicchio-frisee trio with diced black olive and some crumbles of goat cheese. There are also a handful of pastas and a few fish and poultry entrees, all delivered with supreme haste. The sole house-made dessert is a wonderfully creamy panna cotta in a martini glass. —Mike Sula
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